Community Engagement

“How do we authentically engage community to help solve problems and address challenges? Communities might not define challenges in the same way, or might even have a different way of thinking about the challenges than we would. We need to understand from a community’s perspective. It’s about the agency of individuals.”
– MSC Staff Member, WA

Addressing community needs requires intentional community engagement. Regardless of where a multisector collaborative operates—whether they serve 1,000 people or 100,000 people, urban neighborhoods or remote coastal islands—it is essential that MSCs work directly with community members to understand their needs and concerns.

More than that, MSCs should seek to empower community members to be directly involved in confronting health issues. This requires a dramatic shift in business-as-usual for health partners. Rather than only seeing community members in clinics when they are facing health problems, community engagement means proactively engaging community members to guide MSC priorities, inform the development of health interventions, implement effective strategies, and even assess the success of health interventions.

Previous research has demonstrated that involving community members in health research, programming, and interventions can lead to improved equity, address social drivers of health, and overall improve health outcomes. However, research on community engagement within multisector collaboratives is sparse. Our research offers initial insight into the extent to which MSCs engage community, what influence this has on perceptions of the MSC, and what community engagement strategies were employed by MSCs.

Survey Findings:

• 50% of respondents said their MSC is doing a lot to engage residents who represent the community to inform its work (n=133).
• 48% of respondents said their MSC is doing a lot to explicitly involve Medicaid consumers and/or community residents in decision-making (n=120).
• 59% of respondents said their MSC is doing a lot to offer support & resources to encourage Indigenous communities, communities of color, & other historically marginalized groups who disproportionately experience health disparities to be active in the ACH (n=157).
• 58% of respondents said their MSC is doing a lot to make events or meetings accessible to everyone (e.g. providing interpretation services, scheduling meetings outside work hours, offering options to join by web or phone, etc.) (n=153).

Perceptions of Community Engagement

As evidenced by the survey results, MSC participants had mixed feelings about their MSC’s ability to effectively engagement the community. These results were not uniform. Perceptions of strong community engagement varied by different local contexts and participant backgrounds. We found that:

• Not every MSC was seen as equally effective as engaging community.
• MSCs that served larger geographic areas tended to have better perceptions of community engagement.
• MSCs with public funding tended to have better perceptions of community engagement.
• People from tribal communities and nations, as well as people who worked with the MSC, tended to have better perceptions of community engagement, while people who worked in social services and public health tended to have worse perceptions.

The Influence of Community Engagement

Based on these perceptions, we found that when people believed there was stronger community engagement, they also believed that the MSC was doing better with its finances, its ability to create collective action, and its ability to use data.

Strategies for Community Engagement

Finally, we witnessed different strategies for engaging community, which we can divide into two groups. Intentional inclusion and engagement meant making the MSC accessible to all community members, as well as purposefully making efforts to bring community members to the MSC. Community-driven decision making meant substantively including community members in the work of the MSC in order to shift power structures, giving community members power to change how things were being done. We’ll conclude with some strategies for community engagement, a great example taken from our research, and some resources.

“We were having an event and at one point, there was a youth that stood up and was like, ‘Why am I the only youth here?’ She is an indigenous leader and said, ‘There’s a lot of behavioral health needs. I want youth to be more focused.’ And so we asked her if she’d be willing to lead in and help shape what that looks like to make sure that we’re meeting what she believes the needs are within her communities… And so as a direct result of that there was an indigenous youth convening that was held in the fall.”
– MSC Staff Member, WA